She was 21 when she met Cleaver and through him, the Panthers. He had just been released from Folsom State Prison. ''Soul on Ice,'' his groundbreaking 1967 prison memoir, was attracting enormous attention because of his confessions of rape. They were married within months, on Dec. 27, 1967. (The wedding date -- which they had forgotten -- was one of the few useful pieces of information she has culled from the files kept on her by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she says.) In 1968, after a shootout with the Oakland, Calif., police in which another Panther was killed and two policemen injured, Cleaver fled to Algeria. A few months later, pregnant with their first child, Ms. Cleaver joined him. There, they had a son and a daughter. By 1971, after bitter leadership battles inside the organization, the Cleavers split from the Panthers. Today she compares those four years in Algeria, then ruled by a military dictatorship, to being shipwrecked. It was one of the only times in her life she remembers being depressed. ''I'd never been marooned,'' she said. The task of raising her children kept her anchored. Youthful delusions of immortality helped her survive, she says, and probably, too, the contradictory conviction that life could end at any moment. ''You don't have to maintain your sanity if you think any day, you might get killed,'' she explained. In 1975, the Cleavers returned to the United States, and Cleaver, after turning himself in to the authorities, drifted sharply to the right. It is a metamorphosis that Ms. Cleaver doesn't discuss much. ''It has nothing to do with me,'' she declares. She will say that she considered leaving him long before she actually did. She was held back by two things: the knowledge that slavery had torn apart black families for centuries, and that her other family, the Panthers, had by then disintegrated into discord and paranoia. ''I didn't initiate the collapse of the movement, but I had to initiate the separation of my family,'' she said. ''That was very hard.'' #blackhistory #theblackpanthers #kathleencleaver